Firefox…at last. Colour management. Nearly
Filed in Technology & Science - June 18, 2008Firefox v3 is finally here – after a google-like beta period. You might have seen the manufactured news stories – they were trying to get the record of the most downloads in a single day. What the news mostly didn’t mention is that there was no previously recognised record to beat. Any big number would do.
What the news stories also mostly won’t tell you is that this is no trifling affair. This version is COLOUR MANAGED. Go get it now.
There is the minor point to bear in mind that you have to turn the colour management on. The instructions are on Rob Galbraith’s site. Why colour management isn’t enabled right out of the ‘box’ is beyond me. And for all RG’s comment about switching it on being “easy even for the non-geeks in the crowd”, I beg to differ. Your average user isn’t going to type funny words in the address bar, filter the results and then toggle the resulting value. That means the benefits of the improvement will trickle out very slowly amongst everyday users.
Here is a very mild example of why it is worth doing. The screen grab on the left is from a colour managed browser. The same file on the right is in a browser that isn’t colour managed. Somebody scrubbed out all the greens.
Some related posts chosen by the software:
- Colour management 102
- Colour space…
- The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.*
There’s an add-on available which makes enabling and modifying profiles easy. It’s mentioned in this posting, along with the reasons why this isn’t (yet) enabled by default.
June 18, 2008 @ 8:51 pm
Ade,
Plug-ins: who’d ‘ave ‘em!
Still, it is good to know that there is some logic behind the choice. Thanks.
June 18, 2008 @ 8:58 pm
Interesting. But if one is using sRGB, why the need for recognition of other profiles?
June 19, 2008 @ 7:10 am
John,
If one is implementing colour management why would one limited it to just sRGB?
I suspect a misunderstanding…browsers do not automatically understand sRGB. My screen grab example is, in fact, based upon an sRGB image. Firefox 2 on the right isn’t rendering the same colours as a colour managed piece of software like Photoshop or Safari.
June 19, 2008 @ 7:47 am
Thanks for this, Colin. Very useful.
June 19, 2008 @ 9:08 pm
Just one small user experience.
I turned color management on in Firefox v3 using the configuration capability and had several bad experiences, so I turned it off.
1) It’s slower, not a big deal
2) Many pages that have nothing to do with photos had strange colors when compared to IE7 and Firefox v2.
3) More strange artifacts in photo’s than IE7.
4) My photos rendered by all my imaging software look very similar including Firefox v2. Firefox v3 looks entirely different.
Note: Nothing that I am aware of on my computer is color managed or profiled or whatever just straight sRGB with defaults.
June 20, 2008 @ 10:54 pm